Hello everyone. And welcome to the Alchemy podcast. My name is Luca Malaguti and I'm gonna be the host for these episodes. I'm a professional freediver and instructor and spearo and part of the Alchemy team, and the goal of the Alchemy podcast is to travel the world and meet with some of the top freedivers, coaches, trainers, athletes, and just some of the raddest human beings out there. And sit down one on one, have a beer and talk about things that most people don't want to talk about.
For our first episode, we are so proud to announce that we're gonna be talking with none other than Harry Chamas. Harry is a professional free diver, one of the best coaches and trainers out there, a UK national record holder, a specialist in many disciplines like no limits, variable weight, a guru in mouth fill, deep relaxation, and he runs his own company called free dive passion out of Dahab, Egypt. Stay tuned, we have a very interesting episode coming up with our awesome guest, Harry Chamas.
Harry, why the fuck go deep? What is it with this narcosis that is alluring you to the depth as you go deep and you enjoy it and you like going down, and no limits, and variable weight and you've crushed those disciplines?
Um, I mean the thing that's kept me going deeper, it's a lot of the main reasons, has changed over the years. But , um, I think it's like always being about a level of self-control that you need. Because even to freedive in the first place, from the first time you go down until now, there's a lot of natural instincts that say this is wrong, don't do this!
And your natural instinct to go as fast as you can, You know , and your natural instincts to go as fast as you can, like race down, panic, adrenaline mode, fight mode. Like, in the beginning, this is like super obvious when you see a beginner diver doing this, and then the better you get, you kind of like, you'll get to a point where nobody could see it, but maybe on some level you feel it to some percentage.
And then as you get better and better, that percentage is gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller. You're like learning. First you learn to control yourself in the way that you do the right thing, even if you're not feeling the right thing, like faking it till you make it sort of thing. And then you'll do the right thing and feel the right way until a point. But then always when you're doing PBs, when you're pushing those limits, there's gonna be a level of stress.
And I'm not saying everybody that goes deep has s**t in the pants , but they do need to handle this stress. There needs to be some sort of stress management.
Because the brain knows.
The subconscious knows, the subconscious just wants you to stay alive.
I think it was scary .
Stay alive, have babies, you know...
Stay alive , have babies, reproduce...
Reproduce.
It's beyond your control.
Yeah. So it's like developing ourselves physically to do use the technique, use the right power, right speed, equalize. Then also mentally to stay in the right state of mind. And train in a way where it's possible for you to stay in the right state of mind. So just the depth alone already requires a high level of control. And then if you are having to do this thing while under influence of narcosis, then it's just more extreme level of control that you need.
It's just the extra little thing that they , that you get once you start going really deep. But you know, you spent the whole time learning how to control your mind, learning how to control the body, not letting external things affect what you do or how you feel. And then you just, once you start going deep enough, you just get this extra thing. Boom. How do you handle that? You know?
Right. How do you, yeah, I think it was Gary , Gary McGrath that told me it takes 1/500 of a second for your brain to detect that stress. And that is something you cannot even have access to, you're so completely cut subconsciously. Like how do you deal, how do you override that, how do you deal with that? That instinctive , uh, stress that's you can't even identify, but maybe it's there.
I think the key is for it to create the situation where it doesn't happen in the first place. So yeah, it's genetically in or it's like evolution that we switch from parasympathetic to sympathetic in just a moment, right? If you imagine, you are in the cave, you are eating your woolly mammoth or whatever, then all of a sudden, some like dangerous animal pack,, you can't like slowly switch into this fight of flight mode, that needs to happen in an instant .
And the same thing can happen in a dive. You could have done the best breathe up ever, rest, perfect, even to fairly perfect, then something might happen and then boom. But why did that happen? Why did you lose your relaxation? Why did you go from parasympathetic to sympathetic? Well, because you had this feeling that you couldn't handle the situation you were in, you were faced with something that you didn't know how to deal with and then boom, you lose it.
But if you are asking yourself to do something that, you know, you can do, anything that could happen, you've already mentally prepared yourself for, then there's nothing that can like make you lose your relaxation, that can wake you up out of this flow state. And this comes with like experience and training and being very wholesome with how you approach your diving in the first place. Not just train to always do everything perfect. But train to also handle problems that come up.
Visualizing the problems beforehand. Potentially. The famous stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelious, one of the famous emperors of Rome, he used to have the premeditation, where he would pre meditate the worst possible outcomes. Someone stabbing him behind the back, literally , a poor conversation with a senator or death. Premeditate death.
Prepare yourself for the worst and then nothing can surprise you. Nothing is that bad if you've already imagined the worst possible situations happening and knowing that you can still deal with that. Then anything , anything that pops up it's already in your realms of control. You can't just hope that everything's gonna go perfect and not prepare for it if it doesn't, you know. Because if everything goes to s**t, and you're at 140 meters, you're dead. People die on the sled, you know?
Stavros (Kastrinakis) recently.
Well, he didn't die, but could have.
Same accident in Dahab wouldn't have made it unfortunately.
Well, we don't do that deep sled here, but I think if it was in Sharm, he would've been alright . You know, like sled's no joke. And I'll only do sled with Andrea or Stavros. It's like nowhere else in the world, unless I set up my own thing somewhere else and I knew I'd have my perfect safety team , proper accountable , everything good. Um , there's basically no one else that I chose to go deep.
It's two of the best in the world, Andrea and Stavros.
Like there's nobody more experienced than Andrea. Andrea reckons he's done more than a hundred, hundred plus meter dives in the sled. He's been developing that sled and like fine tuning it for years and years, and he's took it super deep himself, he's made mistakes and learned from these mistakes, so I don't have to, you know. I can just go there and be like, okay , let's just do this thing. Good to go . Like to do 140 a t what was it? First d ay?
I d id 100, next day 120, not next day, but next d ive day 120, n ext d ive day, 130, then 140. It was like four dive sessions t o g et t o t hat.
That's well...
Yeah. It's like some people think of no limits as being like easy, like "oh yeah , you don't have to do anything you just gotta equalize". Oh yeah, you do just have to equalize, but then you also have to equalize perfectly, do everything right. Like while you're getting dragged down by your feet...
The psychological effect that has, absolutely.
You know , you're going super or however deep it is that you're going. Normally, if you're doing no limits, it's gonna be deeper than what you've ever been before. Like by definition. And so it's very, very, very much about just keeping your s**t together and just doing everything right. Not, not panicking.
Cause of course you can't panic, but also doing everything perfectly when it comes to equalization and charging , not feeling rushed or overwhelmed by the fact that this super strange thing is happening. It's not like a freefall way, just ease into it, and this like this smooth, super relaxing thing. No, you're getting dragged down by your feet. It's like aggressive, you know.
Then somehow, while you're getting dragged down, you gotta find a way to still be relaxed and still be focused and be okay with the pressure, the darkness, the narcosis.
And not letting the autonomous nervous system switch from the most natural mechanism of parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest too, sympathetic fight or flight. Cuz like if you're being dragged down, like, how is your brain not immediately going to fight or flight? If someone pushes you off the edge of the sidewalk, your brain triggers the flight or flight, it's that simple. That's what vertigo is. In part it has to do with that. Like, oh , what's going on? There's a change in balance.
Of course, it's crazy.
It's like , you've gotta trick your brain, right? Do you see what you're doing as a scary thing? Like if you break it down to the pure, like core of it, do you think what you're doing is scary? Do you think what you're doing is dangerous? If you know, it's something that you can handle then it's not scary. It's not dangerous. Shouldn't be the chance for this switch into fight or flight, you know, you're just doing what you're gonna do. You know? You can handle it. No big deal.
Just go do it, come back up . But for sure, it's like only certain minds that can like do this, you know, if you're like bubbly , neurotic or something that, you just can't shut off, you know?
Like say that one more time, "certain minds that can do this". So are you maybe alluding to, for example , uh , Alex, Honnold, one of the best climbers in the world, climbs freesolo, they did scans on him and they realized this guy can have such a high risk tolerance, not just out of experience and nature, but also because there are biochemical things missing in his brain, he's missing certain things. Yeah. So do you think that applies too?
Definitely.
Definitely does.
I've had a similar conversation with Andrea Zucchari. He's like the only people that can go deep, you know, quickly, you see them like progress from like 20 to like 80 in a couple of months. It's like, if you've gotta be crazy or mad , no, sorry you've gotta be crazy or stupid!
Crazy or stupid. Yeah, absolutely. It's so counterintuitive to your survival mechanisms.
You've gotta have like a very , uh , weak survival instinct, I think.
You have to have a weak survival instinct.
Yeah. I think so.
That's, you're overriding everything that has put you... I mean you were mentioning before we were in the caves, we just hunted, right, there's the rest and digest and sex, rest and digest and reproduce, right, parasympathetic. So in the cave we just ate, we're resting, we had sex. That was basically evolution over and over millions, billions of iterations. And now all of a sudden there's something , uh , a saber tooth tiger or another village that's approaching and attacking us.
And we switch into the fight or flight mechanism. And it's done just in a fraction of a second. And for example, one thing that fascinates me about that is the evolution of the eye. The fact that we have the receptors and the cones of vision on the outside of the eye, the peripherals that can detect motion much, much faster, than in the center of the eye, which has way more , concentration of these , to get data essentially input of the peripherals.
So what training techniques can you use to essentially, basically what I'm saying is if your senses, for example, like your eyes have a , have a connection with the, the change in autonomous nervous system, what techniques of training can you use to literally numb the senses? You have to in a certain way, it's the senses that produce these survival mechanisms and instincts? No?
I wouldn't say so . I'd say it's more like your reactions. That's the direction that I like to take i n. Ra ther t han trying to like, you know, trick my brain somehow, with like maybe I do n't k now wh at, what you're trying to get at w ith, wi th, with sight. But to go back to the Stoics, the only thing that you can control in this life is how you react to the things, you can't change what happens to you. You can only change how you react to that input.
This thing that's happened, whatever it is, doesn't have to make you angry, upset, sad. That's your reaction. You can take th is t h ing a n d m ake whatever you want ou t o f it.
So you're going down on the sled and in the corner of your eye, you see a Barracuda under Andrea's platform, your reaction to that, that's what you mean for example... Yeah. That's what I was getting to with the eye thing. Does that bother you?
For me, like, I don't know . I kind of, when I start the die , I don't give a s**t about nothing. I'm ready to die.
You're ready to die.
I don't think I'm gonna die. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. But I completely into that dive, I've submitted to that dive, I don't care.
That's fascinating.
It's already happening. Cause if you even have that fear in there, if there's something about, something that you're not prepared for, you're never gonna be able to fully give into the dive and just enjoy the dive, enjoy that moment.
Of course.
There's gonna be like some tension, some apprehension, something that doesn't want you to keep freefalling, you know, you've gotta completely submit to it. It's like I'm doing this dive. I know, it's f********g crazy what I'm doing, but it's worth the risk. It's okay to me, if I die.
Literally exactly what Alex Honnold would say when he would solo. I don't want to die. I want to live, but I'm ready if it were to happen and I can assume the responsibility. Which is easy, cuz I'm dead, but yeah. That's crazy. So, so you're really practicing and , and you tell yourself, I , yeah, I am ready to die if it , if that is the outcome.
Yeah. I fully accept like the potential, absolute, maximum consequence of what I'm doing. Yeah . And the , the reward that you get from that is to be able to just enjoy that moment of actually like freefalling through the water super fast. You're like, you feel like the , the kind of turbulence that speed is creating. The whole body is kind of like rippling, the limbs around if you're completely relaxed, you know, just the feeling of that water flowing over the face, over the body.
To just be in that, with like zero anxiety, just with it fully, there's , there's nothing like it in the world. There's no ever experience that I can compare it to, you know , And to take it even further to be like, how grateful can we be for that? You know? Like this is such a special time in the evolution of humanity, nobody's ever experienced this. Nobody's been diving that deep. No . And like ancient history or anything.
It's just us, like now, cause slowly we've kind of realized that we have this potential, you know. It's a freefall for 50 meters or 60 meters, 70 meters, hundred meters even. Yeah . So like in that moment I'm just like, like, wow , this is amazing. You know, like just , just be on it. I wouldn't even be saying to myself, this is amazing. I'm just there, you know, and just grateful that I can have this experience now , you know.
It's the deepest irony, no pun intended. From the outside people will look at you and say you are suicidal and what you're doing is stupid. But in those three, four minutes, you are willing and ready to assume the consequence of death, which is the ultimate. You are actually living more. In t hose three minutes you a re living more than most people w ill live in 30 months.
Yeah. It's like the intensity of the experience. And some people crave these intense moments , you know, like I think that's the draw for a lot of extreme sports people you know.
I had thought about this for a while to truly be, be comfortable with going deep. You needed to accept , um , and begin imagining your death. And this is something the stoic philosophers have always talked about, which has really, really been fascinating me recently. Um , control your perceptions, direct your actions accordingly, surrender to the outcome, the external versus the internal.
Yeah.
What was huge, hugely , um , impactful for me was when I realized that what you imagine is just has the same effect on your body, on your mind as actually doing something. So imagining and actually, and there's several studies on this, the basketball study, the muscle biopsy , uh , study of , analyzing muscle movements. The brain does not discern a difference between really imagining something, with great detail, and actually doing it.
I'm just wondering if that maybe is something you apply in your preparation.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is like the basis of visualization, right? Mm-hmm so you , you exactly. I use my visualization...
But you imagine death is where I'm going at.
No.
You don't.
No.
You've never imagined if tomorrow you are critically ill and in pain, how you would want to go. Cause going on a sled would be pretty awesome! It's a one way road, do you know what I mean?
Yeah , no , no, but I've had like quite a few experiences. Like I've done plenty of crazy s**t in my time and uh , about quite a few moments where I was like, oh , I'm gonna die. Or this could be it, you know , and it's never been a scary thing for me. It's always been like, I'm surprised at how much I just accepted it. But I'm being like, okay, this is it. Like, no adrenaline, nothing . I'm like, oh , this is it. I've lived a great life already. I'm only 35, but like I've done so much, man.
Like things people dream of. And I'm at the point anyway where I'm like, it's okay. It's okay if I go.
Yeah, yeah .
I don't want to, I'll do whatever I can to, to not.
Of course. Yeah .
That's okay.
I like that. And I've thought about that a few times on days when I'm really feeling either physically destroyed or exhausted or somewhat burned out, which is not often, but it's happened. And I think, oh , I have three more of this to do. So I'm 32. There's a statistical chance that I'll live to 96 based on genetics and science and medicine. And to visualize myself, having to redo everything I've done another two times over, makes me be like, whoa , I'm exhausted already of living.
And I think that's a good way. It's a good reminder of like, hey, your time is limited. Make the best of it.
Yeah. You won't be going this hard in none of 30 years though. You would've found a way to be a bit more chilled I reckon.
Physically, but maybe that's compensated by the mind. You lose certain capacities of the body, you make it up with other capacities of the mind.
Yeah.
Hopefully unless we go senile , that'd be interesting. Narcosis, how does narcosis play into that? Do you find yourself addicted to it? Do you find yourself wanting to experience it? You find yourself almost alluring you to the depth to be like, I wanna feel those things, I wanna...
Um, it's not, narcosis for me, it's honestly, iit's never been that extreme. So like my first experience was , I did 105 variable and all that I could say about it was like, my vision was like pixelated. So it was just purely visual. It wasn't like anything else. Then I had the same thing at 110 , my first 110 , no limits, just sort of pixelated vision. And then I did 120 no limits and then I had this , it was like an amazing trip. It was kind of like an acid trip basically.
Is it like an acid trip?
Yeah, but obviously very short and unintense. The story is, it was in Greece, in Kalamata and Stavros, he uses a copper pipe to get the air from the , the tank into the lift bag.
Why a copper pipe?
Because he is worried that a , normal high pressure hose would kind of like whip around and come out of the lift bag.
Okay.
Andreas literally attached the hose to the lift bag, so that's not possible to happen. And that would be potentially what Stavros could do, but he didn't, he hadthis copper hose. So I do the dive, I hit the bottom, everything's all good, I don't feel narced or anything. Then I start to inflate the lift bag .
And then I'm kind of like , not super lucid and there's this sound that the air escaping through the tube was making , which was like out of this world, like nothing you could ever hear before and you know, on the water sound travels different, right?
Yes . Yes.
You can't hear it coming from one place. It comes from everywhere and it was this sort of like, sci-fi surreal sort of screeching, but screeching is not, that sounds like it wouldn't be nice, but it was kind of sci-fi screeching coming from everywhere. And then if felt like it was like coming in , it was like inside me. And it felt like I was traveling for like a worm hole, from space or something like that.
Really?
Yeah. Like all the way.
So it was the sounds that put you on that trip .
Yeah. Like triggered this whole trip. And I was still like aware enough to every now and again, check on my watch, make sure I got off the sled in time. Um , so then I'm like having this trip all the way up, it's just amazing. I'm just like loving life. Then I see him at 40 and get off the sled, start coming up slowly with the safety diver. And then , um , you know, finally I surface, I do my protocol - it was a national record attempt - do my protocol.
As soon as I finished the protocol, I'm like before they give me the card or anything, I'm like, "holy s**t, that was the best experience of my life, I wanna go again, oh my God, that was so good"! And then , uh , they give me my white card, whatever and Stavros is like "you know, you left the , um , the cylinder on like the whole time you were on , you were coming up". So like once the bag is fully supposed to switch the cylinder off .
Oh.
Otherwise like the sled comes to the surface and bubble balls flying everywhere. And it's just like this disaster.
Cause the sleds gonna ride up on its own.
Right. And I'd never made the connection that, okay, Iwas listening to the sound all the way up , having such a good time. But that sound was because I hadn't switched up the , tank, you know.
Oh, okay . You're just , you're just loving the sound.
Yeah. So like the narcosis okay. I really enjoyed it, but I saw that it can affect my decision making ability.
Yeah.
And then like this year going deeper again, I wasn't having, I don't feel like it was affecting my decision making abilities. Like I was super focused in the zone. Everything was good. Honestly, it just felt like, there's two ways I can describe it. If anyone ever fought or boxed, like this feeling when you get punched in the head really hard.
Yeah .
Where you get these like vibrations all the way down your body.
Yeah.
You know, like sort of like tingling all the way down. Same thing would happen if you hit your head really hard I guess. I get that. I'd be at the bottom and I was like, boom, the same sort of feeling. And the way to describe it is like, if you took a huge hit on a bong, but like that very, as soon as you finish, you have this like very like buzzing, like heavy feeling before you're even high yet , you know? But it's like just , it's not the feeling of being high.
It's the feeling of just taking a hit on a bong.
Yeah.
Anyway, so that's what I would feel.
Does that have anything to do with Ischemia? Maybe, you know , uh, a lot of people , um, when they have sex, they want to incorporate certain choking techniques just before they orgasm, because it makes it amazing. It's incredible. Would it be similar, do you think ?
I don't think it's that. No, I think it's just like how my body was reacting to the narcosis.
But on a biochemical level. Well , what do you think is going on when that happened? Especially when you felt like, this is so good. There had to be a flood of serotonin and dopamine right there .
Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I don't know. I don't really know exactly what causes narcosis, you know?
But you know how it feels and you like it.
Yeah. Like I said, like , I used to just enjoy like getting high as a teenager and in my early twenties and I'd go to like the bank and try and do normal stuff or I'd go shopping and like dealing with people and, you know, I used to like just enjoy getting high and trying to like function, you know? So like just putting myself in this kind of like f****d up state of mind and then try and still like force my mind to work like properly in a normal social environment.
And then this is like this narcosis is kind of the same. Right? You're like f*****d up, but you still need to perform, you're in this situation where you need to make it happen. Kind of the same. Like, I think it's similar if you do like an acid trip or a mushroom trip or whatever. If you get caught on a thought and you start just following that thought , you get completely lost in it. And it can be like a negative thought .
It can be positive thought where you get, you get lost and this is how bad trips happen. Right.
Yeah.
If you start thinking something negative and then the mind just fixates on this thing and it gets worse, worse, worse , worse...
Yes. Especially with magic mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis.
Yeah.
You can ride the emotional highs, emotional lows. And you can train that. So is it similar? Cause I know you told me you've taken mushrooms and you've had these amazing experiences.
Yeah. I think it's the same, the mind is gonna work in the same way. So if you experience this narcosis and then you start like worrying about it...
Yes.
Then it's gonna be a very negative experience. If you experience narcosis and then get lost in the, the positive thing, like how the feeling of the water or whatever, then it can be like kind of a nice experience, but you'll get distracted and potentially you'll do something wrong.
Right. True . Okay.
If you just feel it and you just stay present in the moment and focus on what you need to do, then it's not really gonna affect it that much. And that's how I found my deep diving to be this year.
Feel it, but stay present in the moment, focused.
I was literally just feeling what it was doing to me physically. It didn't change my decision making ability.
Very cool. And you've experimented with diving with certain psychedelics?
Uh , yeah, I've done it in the past.
You comfortable talking about this?
Never on the line. Never deep diving, but yeah, I've been , uh , fun diving on the reef and even spearfishing.
Okay . Cause I can tell you for, without saying any names, but we know who we're speaking about that there's some hundred meter plus free divers that are definitely looking into this. Some research on this for a truly medical and beneficial purpose. Um, psilocybe cubensis, DMT, ayahuasca, dealing with PTSD and other disorders and how these things can actually help us to deal with it. So in the right environment, the right setting with the dosages can be very beneficial and...
Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't say you need to freedive even to do it. But I mean, yeah. One of my best experiences of my life was like freediving on mushrooms. It's like , it just heightened all of my senses. I had like just my Speedo on and just the feeling of moving through the water, the water moving over the whole body and...
We can call it freediving our mushrooms with Harry Chamas, you'll get twice as many requests! Wait, what? And you can charge twice as much too!
Yeah . But then also at the same time, there was three of us and one of the guys was not having a very good time at all. And then the two of us were in the water. Like, "man, you gotta come in, this is amazing". Then our third Ben came in, it was like, he got out after like less than a minute. He like, didn't like it at all, you know? And he was a freediver as well, but he just, wasn't having a very good time on the , on the trip.
It's not something I recommend everybody does, but you know, as you can probably tell if you've listen to this podcast , uh , I've got a very high level of self control . So I know I can put myself in certain situations. I've done mushrooma before, I've done psychedelics before. I'm at the point where I know I can't f**k up. I'm not the guy that tries to fly out the top storey of a b uilding.
Yes.
Cause he's on acid.
Yeah.
You know, I'm not gonna forget that I need to breathe and just freedive forever. It's just a different way to experience this thing in like an altered state.
Yeah. Um, do you think that's instinctual or it just comes from familiarization that you've, you've done it the right way and you've experimented with your body the right way. And then you just, you just know how to control. You just know how to, whether you're freediving deep on narcosis or whether you're having a nice chilled mushroom trip connecting with nature disconnecting from work and laptops...
I think I learned my lessons the hard way.
The hard way?
I've earned my budges. And I kind of like realized where it came from and I realized like to, to handle it and it , it was like this, I spoke about it earlier, this , uh , negative thought pattern and the spiral that it can take you on. So I, I kind of, I started to, as soon as I started to have these negative thoughts automatically I would shut it off and then start to think about something good. So I was trying to take myself from a negative sort of path to a positive path.
Um , and for a long , for quite a long time, that's what I was doing. And then , um , I realized that actually the best possible experience that you could have is to not think about anything. And now normally if I'm on psychedelics, I'll spend some of the time meditating.
Okay .
Just sitting and maybe doing some pranayama and meditating. And even then the rest of the time, I'm trying to do like active meditation the whole time. So the same present in the moment I'm not getting ( inaudible) and it's like a whole other level of experience. Like there's a very, very tangible reward for like not being in your head the whole time.
Yeah.
To just be like here, soaking everything up, connecting to the whole universe, you know? Cause this is what you experience.
Yeah.
Um , compared to, you know, just looking at your hand, oh , this is cool. Or listen to some music, whatever. That's cool as well.
Yeah.
But like , it's nothing compared to feeling like you are one with everything. Right ? And you only get that feeling through meditation for me anyway.
And meditation, underwater doing a little hang, being underwater is always meditative and on land, just sitting down and just...
Yeah, that's what I mean between active and, and just sitting. So...
That's what I plan to do tomorrow. Just go dive and then go... That's a good, thank you. That's really good advice. When I am out of the water, just go down somewhere quiet and meditate, which I truly enjoy doing on a regular basis too. So...
Yeah, like when, when I did my yoga teacher training in India, like the doctors who shield the guy that was running the course, he was kind of explaining how prama works, how pranayama helps you to control the prana, what's should experience, what you should feel. And some of the things that I've experienced meditating on hallucinogenics are almost exactly what he was talking about. So it's kind of like a little taste there, you know, of what it could be.
Yeah.
If you decided to be, you know , a real Yogi and spend four, eight hours a day meditating and, and developing that spiritual side of it, it's like a little teaser.
Nice. Oh, I like that. That's that's really interesting cuz um , for me playing around around very little, but started praying around and I definitely wanna explore more of this with psilocube cubensis, magic mushrooms, a supernatural mushroom, which just grows. Um, I, I started to enjoy the navigation between the highs and the lows, when the vibrations were good, you know, external influence let's say, and the highs, I was like, "wow, this is nice".
And then when it would go down, because somebody maybe that entered the room that I didn't feel had such a good vibe , um, I would observe how it would go low and then I'd be able to at least for a time being step out of it and be like, okay, well "why is this actually affecting me"? Like, is this, is this actually affecting my psyche? Is it actually affecting my body? Am I in danger? No. It's like why?
And to question that to take a step back was very interesting on keep navigating back to the high. And uh , I really, really, really enjoyed that and how it can be applied to the highs and the lows that we get from, from performances, from competition. Oh , I just got a bunch of red cards. This competition was s**t. All right , right . How are you gonna deal with that?
Yeah.
So similar for you. Like it was kind of...
Um , since that, you know, like I told you, like my first experience was like rough with hallucinogens. But since then, since I had that sort of realization and I've basically never had a bad experience on hallucinogens, it's always been good.
It's always been good. You've been able to like you said, you've got good mind control, self ,control so you've been able to handle it. Super cool. I find it really fascinating how that experience self control, enjoying , taking LSD, psilocybe cubensis and how that plays into your narcosis and deep freediving is, I mean, you might be one of the few people talking about this in the world.
Cause we know people that have done those depths that you have, and they were not having a good time and they pushed and they pushed and they pushed and they were not in the same mental state, flow state of mind as you were. We're not gonna name names, but we know who we're talking about. And the fact that you're coming up from 140 and you're like, "dude, I wanna go back down, that was so f******g good.
Yeah. I was coming up from 140 on a sled.
So already a little different, yeah .
Having to pull yourself down or swim yourself down or whatever.
Yes.
And so obviously I've never been to those depths, been like high 90s in the normal disciplines, but for me, I don't experience narcosis at those depths, even up to 100 in constant weight, I didn't feel any narcosis.
Even up to a 100 in constant weight, you didn't experience narcosis, that's amazing...
For me, it's deeper . It's gotta be deeper . The visual between maybe like past 105, I've only ever felt it at that d epth.
Yeah.
And then I didn't notice too much of a difference in the feeling between 120 and 130, 140. It was all like kind of similar.
That's very interesting.
But knowing you've got a free ride all the way up, that's gotta help cuz there's a lot , lot of things playing into this thing, right? Like I can be a hundred percent confidence cause I know I'm not gonna black out. All I've gotta do is hold my breath, go down there. Hardly created any CO2 is essentially a static .
Okay. Mentally it's hard to just stay focused and relaxed in this time, but there's a lot less external factors which could create like some negative thought patterns or, or stress or something like this. Um , so I can't really compare myself to the deepest constant weight guys and the deepest free immersion guys.
I'm finding this particularly fascinating because I've spoken to many people about this, not many, but a few, and on one hand, we've got this group of, let's say European, maybe Europeans that used to live in the Soviet union, under the Soviet union. So people that were drinking and doing drugs was like part of like the culture, you know ?
Yeah.
Doesn't matter. Even in the UK, right?
Yeah. Yeah. We like to drink.
At a certain age you like to start drinking and you start doing drugs and it's totally, totally normal. And then on the other hand and yeah, and so these people they're like, yeah man, I love it. I'm enjoying it. I want to experiment more with it. I'm not feeling narcosis at the depths that you're mentioning you are going down a hundred meters constant weight and you're not feeling narcosis. That's insane.
And then on the other hand of the spectrum, I'm speaking to some , uh , Asians, specifically Chinese. And I point out that because we know that Chinese, among other Asian groups lack an enzyme to digest alcohol. That's why they get the Asian flush. And they're telling me, "oh man, 50 meters, 60 meters , I get narced". I'm like what? I'm like, did you grow up drinking? "No, no. I've never drank. I've never done drugs or anything". I'm like...
Yeah. I'm wondering like how much of that is they feel strange and they just label it narcosis.
Okay. Maybe .
Yeah. Cause for me, I don't know . I don't see it. I don't see it as possible.
You don't see it?
At 50 meters , 60 meters... I don't, maybe you get distracted maybe. On every dive I'm in an altered state. I could absolutely say that. It's like not my normal state of being for sure. But for me there's a difference between being in an altered state and being narced and it's a very unmistakeable difference.
Right.
You know , it's like clear. So I dunno , I kind of , uh , don't believe in ( inaudible)the 50. I just don't believe it.
Nah. Okay . Yeah .
Maybe they are, but there's no way for me to ever know. I can't like put myself into, into that body and experience what they're experiencing, but maybe they're just s******g their pants.
I guess my last question for you, Harry is, your experience, your background and experience in being open at trying all these different substances, psychedelics and the way that you have developed that self-control of your mind and your body, do you think it has played a role in having a better tolerance to narcosis? I guess that's as simple of a question as it can be.
Yeah . I would say so.
Straight up, yes.
The lessons that I've learned from, from trippin definitely apply.
Apply.
Yeah . Specifically this controlling the mind and not letting yourself get lost in forth . But I could also, you could say you could learn the same things from meditation, but it's like, you don't get punished the same way.
The feedback is not the same. Yes .
It's just like, oh I'm not focused anymore. And then you just like try and meditate again , but on a trip, if you start, if you let the mind go somewhere negative, it's like, like f**k, fasten your seatbelt . It's not gonna be a very nice few hours.
True. You gotta be dialed in.
It forces you to land these lessons. Like for me it's, it's literally the same, literally the same.
Yeah. And a lot of people can relate to this. How many people have gotten really, really f******g high of weed. And then they have their parents' cars and they're like driving. They're like, "I can't crash this . I can't crash this" . And then they have the munhies so they go to McDonald's and they're like, "I don't want people to know I'm high.
So I gotta be act normal and order", like where we're just like trying to maybe order McDonald's some food and we're like, we're getting maybe a bit , uh , uh , you know, what's the word I'm looking for?
Paranoid?
Paranoid. Yeah.
I say it's like, weed is probably the hardest thing to do it on for , for me anyway, in my experience .
Fine. Okay .
It's much easier to, to stay in control on mushrooms and acid.
Yeah.
Especially when it comes to just keeping the mind focused. My mind's like all over the place on weed .
Interesting. Perfect. Yeah. When we talk about psychedelics in recovery studies and studies with PTSDs , they're usually referring to psilocybe cubensis and LSD and DMT, ayahuasca. Um, do you know about the stone ape theory?
Rings a bell actually. Yeah.
Let's end on that. Cause we've been going on and we gotta stop otherwise Charlie's gonna kill me .
Okay.
Uh , um, I think it's a fun way to end. There's a really good podcast with Joe Rogan and um , Paul Stamets, Paul Stamets is a world renowned mycologist. One of the best people , uh , about mushrooms. He's written a book that thick on how to grow mushrooms, how to inoculate them. He knows everything. And obviously he's a experimented many a times with psilocybe cubensis which he truly believes is an incredible substance given us to us by nature.
Just like we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain. Therefore there's a connection between having nature in the natural environment. There's similar things with psilocybe cubensis and other fungis.
Yeah.
Which have been around for billions of years. And the deepest irony is also that we outlaw these things when they're actually integrated in our bodies. Anyways, the stoned ape theory, actually it's not even a theory, it's a hypothesis, stoned ape hypothesis, cuz it's not yet proven, tries to explain how the human body , uh , the human brain, a part of the human brain evolved so rapidly within a relatively short period of time. We cannot explain that.
And there's not enough geologic fossil evidence, sorry, paleontological evidence to prove how it happened. So that's why it's just a hypothesis.
Yeah.
Human brain evolved in a super short period of time. But what we know during that time is that we were bipedal and we were here in Northern Africa. We're in Egypt right now but at that time we were in Ethiopia or Sudan, just came off the trees, we're bipedal . So we are hunting down animals, whatever , uh , camels , uh , giraffes, rhinos, elephants, they were around, you know, back then maybe in different forms, but they were around and we're hunting them down.
And because we're bipedal we can maybe out walk them, but we cannot outrun them. So we'll injure them and then we'll have , have to really cover distances or follow migration patterns and we really have to get to them. Right? So what are we doing as we follow them?
Foraging?
Foraging. That's right. We wanna get meat. There's not always meat. We're going to get the meat, which will last us for months. But we got a forage and we're foraging also through the animal's poop.
Ah, yeah. I see .
Because that's the best way to follow an animal, follow the poop. What grows on poop Harry?
Magic mushrooms!
Magic mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis. So here we are over thousands of years, billions of iterations chasing these animals, taking ingesting magic mushrooms. Now PTSD studies are showing that taking psilocybe cubensis can cause two things in people, which is why they're doing all of these tests, especially in the US for , uh , war veterans. It causes people to become courageous and empathetic. I think we can both relate to that.
Yeah. Yeah .
When I have had magic mushrooms I am very empathetic. I love to hug, cry, open up, run naked in the woods with my dog, literally, and I think I'm relatively courageous, you know, being naked in public or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm sure you've had similar experiences. Courageous and empathetic.
I can agree.
You're not violent as you would be on alcohol, is basically absolutely no . And courage and empathy are two massive , uh , attributes of a good leader. So here we are ingesting these magic mushrooms becoming good courageous and empathetic leaders. And at the same time, when you take magic mushrooms, you see certain patterns of nature, certain geometric patterns that you otherwise, maybe wouldn't see.
So we start looking up at the stars as we're tracking these animals and we start seeing different parts, putting together different dots, literally.
Yeah.
And that tries to explain how the human brain evolved in such a short period of time. It's just a hypothesis, but I will find it to be a very interesting hypothesis. The stoned ape theory.
Okay. I'll look it up.
You should definitely look it up. I think you'll really enjoy it. I love talking about it because maybe it's true, you know... Thanks buddy! The Alchemy Podcast is supported and sponsored by Alchemy. They are always on the forefront of researching and developing new products. Uh, their latest product, the Alchemy Neck Weight is one I'm a huge fan of and many other freedivers are also really enjoying its use. So a big shout out to Alchemy and thank you for supporting this podcast .